Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement

By Taylor Branch

(Simon and Schuster; 210 pages; $26)

Martin's Dream

A Memoir

In this 50th anniversary year of his "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King Jr. has reached a pedestal few historical figures can claim. To most Americans, he is the civil rights movement. And in his venerated shadow, the movement itself is often reduced to little more than "Rosa Parks sat down, King stood up, and the rest is history."

But this anniversary allows for deeper reflection. And just in time for King's birthday and the forthcoming 50th commemorations, noted historians Taylor Branch and Clayborne Carson have published overviews of King, his times and his legacy.

Branch spent 24 years writing his acclaimed trilogy on King. Subtitled "America in the King Years," it ranks with the best of all American biographies. The first volume, "Parting the Waters," won the Pulitzer Prize. But not everyone in the Obama years has time to read 2,306 pages on King. This sad truth makes Branch's new abridged version, "The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement," a welcome addition to any civil rights bookshelf.

In cutting his epic down to size, Branch intended "to convey both the spirit and the sweep of an extraordinary movement." With his highly readable anecdotal approach, he succeeds admirably. Each of the book's 18 chapters is suffused with drama, detail and death-defying courage, not just from King and Parks but from lesser-known figures deserving of their own pedestals.

Here is Bob Moses rising from a beating to walk, bloody but unbowed, into a Mississippi courthouse to help blacks register to vote. Here is Diane Nash, leading fellow members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Alabama to continue the fire-bombed Freedom Rides. And here are the volunteers of Freedom Summer, beaten and harassed but staying on to teach in Freedom Schools and live in shotgun shacks with the grandchildren of slaves.

Branch's movement marches on - to Selma and Chicago, through the controversy over "black power" and the struggles of King's Poor People's Campaign. Even though we know where this is headed - to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis - Branch's storytelling skill makes this slim anthology so much more than the standard King-Parks story.

One marcher not in Branch's narrative is Clayborne Carson. As a 19-year-old history student, Carson stood in the crowd at King's landmark speech. But as a young idealist, Carson identified more with SNCC than with King. Carson went on to write the first full history of SNCC, and has spent the past 40 years as a respected civil rights historian at Stanford.

Although late to appreciate King, Carson made up for lost time. In 1985, King's widow chose him to edit her husband's papers. The story of Carson's journey from marcher to historian of the movement fills his new memoir, "Martin's Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr."

Carson's evolution from mild King enthusiast to spokesman for the King foundation should be interesting. And indeed, his '60s memories of being torn between militancy and moderation do not disappoint. The rest of the memoir, however, makes for reading only a historian could love.

While he is doubtless a meticulous researcher and archivist, as a writer Carson is no Taylor Branch. Much of his memoir recounts how he watched the civil rights movement - on TV, in the papers, through a glass dully. Here, for example, is Carson learning of King's assassination: "As I listened to a succession of news reports about the shooting, I felt a profound sadness, as if I had lost someone close to me."

Even Carson's insider accounts of ideological battles with Coretta Scott King and her children fall flat. The struggles of this contentious family would test any writer, but Carson seems loath to describe them. He meets again and again with King's son Dexter, only to be kept at arm's length. He struggles to get access to private letters from King to Coretta, but is denied. Ultimately, as King's children sue and countersue each other, Carson decides to establish a King Institute at Stanford and turns his attention to getting the King memorial built on the Washington Mall.

Throughout his long journey, Carson comes across as a very nice man, reserved, polite and ponderous. When he discovers the original draft of King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he can muster no more than that he struggled "to control my emotions as I grasped the significance of what I had read." And after relentless disagreements with the King family, he concludes, "I resolved to stay as far away as possible from the internecine warfare."

But if Carson's memoir will only please historians, Branch's should be required reading for all Americans. "The King Years" reminds us that within living memory an entire generation, mostly black but some white, rose up as one, marched and sat in, suffered in jail cells and sweated in shacks, lay down in the streets and laid down their lives to end the American apartheid. That movement, that sacrifice should be celebrated and studied, not just on holidays or in anniversary years, but as a daily example of the best in the American spirit.